Informatix

New Release of Skype

Admin 6:57 am on 28 February 2010 | 0 Permalink

Skype has just released a major upgrade to it's Skype product in Windows. Dubbed as 4.2, this release brings several new features, such as:

Skype Access – access WiFi hotspots the easy way with your Skype Credit.
Call transfer – transfer calls to a Skype contact or a mobile or landline.
Updated call quality guide with pre-call soundcheck.

Full detail about the this release can be found on the Changelog (PDF).

Unfortunately, there is no update (yet) for Linux platform. The latest version for Linux is 2.1.0.81. I don't know about Mac OS X as i don't use it.

Mercurial Tutorial

Admin 5:44 am on 27 February 2010 | 0 Permalink

Today i found an interesting website about Mercurial written by Joel Spolsky. It gives you a brief tutorial about Mercurial and how is it compared to Subversion, another revision control tool widely used in this world. I would recommend this site if you are planning to find a revision control tool to help you working with other people around the world. This tutorial is also helpful if you are having problem with CVS or Subversion and you would like to find an alternatives to it.

Other alternative to Mercurial is Git, originally written by Linus Torvalds (now maintained by Junio). It's also distributed revision control tool, unlike Subversion or CVS which are centralized. You can find the tutorial for Git on Git Book or in Charles Duan's website in Harvard.

Learning how to use revision control will help you organize your team even if your team are not located in the same place, same building, same city, same country. Your team can be widespread around the world, but they can share their work to others without interupting other's work or causing a dillema on the code itself (whether it's a buggy code or late code because people are afraid to commit to the repository unless it has been well tested).

Chinatown in Ketandan

Admin 6:51 am on 26 February 2010 | 0 Permalink

As always, Chinese New Year is always celebrated in many places, including Jogja. For the last several years, Jogja always held a mini Chinatown in Ketandan (near Melia Hotel) to held a Chinese New Year celebration.

This year, the celebration was held since 23 - 28 February 2010. I was lucky enough to visit there tonight and to see my girlfriend sang on the event because she was asked to give a contribution by singing.

There were so many foods on this area and what i saw is that the booth were getting much bigger and bigger in terms of number. That's because the event took place in more alleys than before, so more booth can join and make this event much more spectacular.

You can attend the last two day and probably you can also see fireworks at the last day. Go visit it or you will have to wait until next year

Videos and Education Method

Admin 5:54 am on 25 February 2010 | 0 Permalink

Today i tried to use videos instead of giving all the lectures to my students. I used a demonstration made by VirtualForge to demonstrate how XSS and XSRF works in real life.

They were really enjoying the video as well as i did, so i thought it worked. I will try to find more videos to be presented to the students, so they can enjoy the class and can have better understanding about the material i will give to them.

Thanks to those who have created all the videos available on the Internet. You really helped me out to explain something to the students

Wushu Show

Admin 5:42 am on 24 February 2010 | 0 Permalink

I just came back from attending an event at Grand Pacific and i saw a Wushu demonstration from two wushu association in Jogja and another one from Guangzhou, China. All of them showed a spectacular moves and i was amazed by them.

Some of the players from Jogja has achieved gold medal in junior olympic competition and also in national events. Great job and keep it up

Disabling Zimbra View Mail Button on Administrator Console

Markus 5:10 pm on 23 February 2010 | 0 Permalink

I've been searching for a solution to disable the "View Mail" button in Zimbra's Administrator control panel. I think this "View Mail" button is not necessary and further more it is privacy breach as administrator can see all emails inside an email account. The new version 6.0 Network Edition seems to be able to do that [...]

Time Management

Admin 6:02 am on 23 February 2010 | 0 Permalink

What i learn from my student's posting at Plurk is that most of them are too busy working on the assignment given to them by the lecturers. Before this semester started, i have given a warning about how much classes should they take. We even already have a guidance book, but it's rarely be read or even opened. In the end, they got frustated because the assignments are coming in almost every week.

It's a consequence of trying to finish the study as fast as they can, but they will gain nothing from it. This is a paradigm that happened nowadays. Students wanted to take as much as possible, without looking whether they can get benefit of it or not. The main focus is take the class and don't care if they even get a knowledge or not. What a shame

If you know what's the risk are, then what you need is a good time management, so that you can have time to finish all the assignments given to you. Start managing your time or you will be frustated with all the assignments

Recording My Own Screen Activity

Admin 6:33 am on 22 February 2010 | 0 Permalink

In Windows, we could use Camtasia to record our activity in our screen. I thought that would be impossible to be done in Linux, but i was wrong. I use RecordMyDesktop which is able to record what you are doing on your own desktop and this is for Linux/Unix platform. This application also has 2 frontends: pyGtk (gtk-recordMyDesktop) and pyQt4 (qt-recordMyDesktop). I compiled both of them and works great on my Slackware Linux desktop.

I will use it to produce my own video for demonstrating to do something on Linux or even to teach my students on some of my course (computer security for example).

Graduation

Admin 4:37 am on 21 February 2010 | 0 Permalink

Today, my campus held a graduation ceremony. There were 201 students who graduated this time and my department contribute 84 of them and what makes me proud is that the best three graduates comes from my department

Congratulations to all of you and prepare yourself to enter the real world

I'm sorry that i can't be there yesterday and today as i have another task to do in these two days, but i wish you luck

Talk Show

Admin 6:45 am on 20 February 2010 | 0 Permalink

Tonight, i was asked to be one of the speaker of a talk show at Petra Radio. It talked about using Facebook to do online business. Even though Facebook was not meant to be a place to do business (except for advertisements), it's very common to see many people sell their items on Facebook and what happens is that many people see this as a new opportunities to do side jobs, because they don't have to work 8 hours a day in front of their computer, starring their screen all day long. They can do other activities and you only need to spend few hours a day to check if there's an order and deal with your customers.

Thank you for listening the show and i hope all of your questions were answered in the show. If you still have any questions which i didn't or haven't answered, please send me an email and i will gladly answer it.